Weekend Musings 25
Thoughts on TikTok eating Meta and Google’s pie, Reach vs Impressions, Meta and top-of-funnel ads, and more
Earlier in the week India celebrated Guru Purnima. As the name suggests the festival is observed to honour one's chosen spiritual teachers or gurus or leaders. It falls on a full moon day.
Tiruvannamalai - my town goes crazy on full moon days. As lakhs of believers come to the town to do the 16 KM pradakshina around Arunachala. But on special full moon days, the madness grows 10X.
I write more about the day and why I consider my Father(nana) and Bhagavan as my gurus who are helping me to become a better person.
Finding the Guru - the guru is the self.
TikTok eating Meta and Google’s pie
Last week I shared how Meta is going bonkers with videos. After promising to jam the feed with videos from everywhere it now plans to convert every video on Instagram into Reels.
Not just Facebook, Google has been very worried about the growth of short-form videos such as TikTok and Instagram Reels. Google says: “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
What is interesting here is the way the younger audience is using search unlike we oldies who either Google or Whatsapp for recommendations from a friend -
“Younger people were generally interested in more “visually rich forms” of search and discovery, and that wasn’t just limited to where to eat.”
Hence you already see videos from Instagram and TikTok on Google search and this is why it is also pushing Shorts - Google’s offering for short videos.
Now I understand Facebook’s new goal to build the “discovery engine.”
Video ranks high in spending growth
According to Merkle Q3 2022 Performance Media Report: Spending on video, another form of display advertising, increased Y/Y for 65% of respondents, making it the channel on which spending increased for the greatest percentage of advertisers.
Paid social channels registered the greatest increase in importance, with 67% of respondents prioritizing paid social more this year than in 2021.
When asked to rank their top two priorities across display and paid social, 43% chose “targeting users effectively in the face of new privacy regulations and tracking changes.”
Abandoning carts and email followup
According to a Baymard survey, 24% of respondents abandoned their carts because eCommerce forced users to create accounts. And then are other reasons too. So how do you solve the problem with Email? Adleaks shares 4 ways to nurture leads with abandoned cart email flow.
One of the ways is getting email addresses during checkouts. Engaging via emails is a great way and even NGOs can use this technique.
Reach vs Impressions
At times it is good to go back to basics and look at how different platforms are defining Reach and Impressions. Facebook estimates reach and define the metric as the number of people who see any content from or about your Page. Facebook also lists impressions as the number of times any content from or about your Page enters your screen.
However, LinkedIn does the best job. On LinkedIn, the main distinction between reach and impressions is that reach is based on unique views, whereas impressions include all views.
Meta and top-of-funnel ads
Gatorade participated in a long-term equity study, and the results showed that Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns were high contributors to unaided brand awareness and preference, second only to TV.
The campaign used ad creative that showed brand elements upfront; running short-form, six-second video ads versus still image ads; using a combination of the reach and video view ad objectives, and opting into multiple placements.
Additionally, it targeted Custom Audiences on Facebook. In fact, videos + custom + lookalike audience is more or less the sauce for FB ad campaigns.
However, Fospha’s report on the State of eCommerce Advertising states that iOS 14 has had a serious impact on Meta’s ability to report revenue in Ads Manager.
“What we can see here is that the iOS update disproportionately impacts top-of-funnel campaigns. This makes sense: now that Meta is measuring using a 7-day click/1-day view model, activity that is designed to warm audiences up but not immediately convert them is almost always falling outside their attribution window. ”
In fact, a channel’s potential full funnel effectiveness varies by region says, Nielsen. Generally, digital display, social and TV are strong for both sales and brand objectives about 60% of the time.
Brand and content framework
Here is a nice 12-step content Framework that will help you to create content ideas that make sense for your brand that doesn’t suck.
And writing a good brief is an expectation from brand marketers that is rarely fulfilled. Here is a fantastic practical guide from Mark Ritson.
Weekend thought
A few years ago if I got a wish then I might have asked for a better personal life, work, money etc. Today if I get a wish then I would like to have a switch to control my brain. I decide when it should think and I decided when it should just switch off.
Wouldn’t that be lovely :)
Well, it might take a lifetime to happen, the White Hibiscus didn’t take much time to bloom.
White is peace and love.